As the international community’s efforts to combat climate change slow, ideas or technologies that had once been labeled as outlandish or silly are being given a second thought in the US.

The National Academy of Sciences has gathered a team of climate scientists to consider ideas such as power plants that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or mirrored satellites that reflect solar energy back into space. Even the CIA has shown interest in such plans. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab in La Cañada Flintridge and the Pacific Northwest National Lab (funded by Bill Gates) in Richland, Washington are beginning to study what these technologies would do to weather patterns. Although there is massive interest in these new ideas, many people have expressed concerns over the risks of tampering with the climate in this way. Some explain that getting the public’s hope up for geo-engineering as a way to halt climate change would undo or lessen support to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Agencies are also having trouble designing and understanding how laws would factor into the possibility of controlling the weather. Technologies, they explain, may be produced and used by anyone without any policing by international or even national laws. In 2012, a California businessman put 200,000 pounds of iron rich dust off the coast of British Columbia to encourage a plankton bloom in hopes that the plankton would increase the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon. In the same year, British scientists planned on spraying liquids at high altitudes to see if the liquids would have a similar cooling effect to that of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. However, the plans were stopped because people were unsure if field tests should even be occurring if there  was no regulation. Scientists even argued that if such a plan were carried out on a large scale, it could have extreme ramifications and could make current droughts of floods worse.

Technology used to brighten clouds

What scientists in labs are seeing right now are enormous influxes of new, and often strange ideas. The most realistic ones seem to be those that involve removing carbon from the atmosphere. Those that redirect sunlight would be faster to implement but would also be more risky. Scientists fear that if we actually use the new technologies and they fail or crash, the backlash from the environment itself could be so severe that humans would have little time to adapt or come up with a new plan. As people become more desperate for a solution however, those who fund research and those who make laws have become more open to different possibilities which has opened the door to exploring ideas to reverse the effects of climate change.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-climate-engineering-20140305,0,5604112,full.story#axzz2vCU0yGZJ